Horowitz: Yes. There is a very complicated mathematical formula that we worked on to make it work. And we went back and forth because we had versions where Eddie and I, math is not necessarily our strong suit, where we would have Kevin Flynn was in there for 28,000 years.

Kitsis: It sounded great in the script - it's like one cycle equals eight hours, but we were like, oh, so he's been in there for a million years?

Horowitz: We worked it out with Joe and we call them microcycles and there are divisions. And I think it's something like, a microcycle is like eight hours or we sort of basically we figured it out. But the concept is when you're in the grid, your time is working at a different rate than it is out here."

"Reveal your creation date or I will disassemble your code one operation at a time!"

Wow! Okay, now we've got REAL confusion! We've all heard or read conflicting things, such as microsecond, microcycle, and millicycle...All of which could mean very different things, so I'm not sure what to believe now! LOL!

I'm going to have to see the movie again and listen very closely to that scene to see what Kevin actually says to Sam. But overall, the takeaway for me is that time does move faster on the Grid than in real life.

I think you doubled up on your week there, my friend. You have 21 millicycles = 7 days and then 84 millicycles = 1 week. I think you meant 84 millicycles =1 month. So it kinda threw off your calculations a bit there...

It doesn't necessarily have to be consistent. Presumably, a "cycle" as a unit of time is based on a CPU's clock cycle. As anyone who works with computers knows, programs don't always run at optimum speed and make the same amount of progress per CPU cycle. A program is advanced as quickly as the CPU is able to but can be bogged down or even frozen depending on the demands on the processor. We've all seen this while playing video games, a system may be humming along cranking out your favorite 3D fragfest at 60 frames per second, then all of a sudden something else puts a demand on the processor and next thing you know it's choppy, 30 frames per second, and then there's a high rendering demand because of fast motion and a lot of objects on the screen, and you get a lag-filled "slideshow" effect as the program bogs down. It might even freeze for a second or two before CPU demand drops and things get back up to speed.

This could happen to Flynn's system countless times in 20 years, so there is really no telling how long precisely passed inside the system during that time. We can know the optimum speed, but you'd need another computer to crunch 20 years worth of system speed logs to figure out how much actual rendering took place.

ShadowDragon1 Wrote:I think I will go with the writers of the film, if they say it's been "28,000 yrs" inside The Grid, that's good enough for me.

That's really not what they said. They said:

"And we went back and forth because we had versions where Eddie and I, math is not necessarily our strong suit, where we would have Kevin Flynn was in there for 28,000 years.

Kitsis: It sounded great in the script - it's like one cycle equals eight hours, but we were like, oh, so he's been in there for a million years?"

This is clearly them saying that they went through variations and at a couple points the math worked out into these absurdly huge numbers. I think it's issues like this that let them to leave it somewhat vague.

Divid 31,536,000 by 50,000 and you get 630.72 seconds or 10 minutes 30.72 secends.

Therefor one millicycle = 10 minutes 30 senonds in our time. I not including leap years.

Now here's a queston for you all. Keven Finn said in the movie that it takes huge amounts of power to keep this gate to the real world open. The queston I would like to know is how much power would it take to keep the gate open? Because if you are using huge amounts of power for 10.5 minutes don't you think that the power companies would have noticed that much of a drain on thier grid? By the way Finn was talking I would think that it would be 10's or even 100's of kilowatts he's talking about. Maybe even megawatts.

That is a lot of power to be using for ten minutes and it would have been investigated.
Don't you think?